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Saturday, February 1, 2014

#898: Ron Luce

Ron Luce is the founder of Teen Mania Ministries,
one of the scariest organizations in the US, its BattleCry Campaign and the
Acquire the Fire (ATF) youth conference. TMM is an evangelical youth
organization that promotes fundamentalist Christianity and theocracy by
focusing on the more feral, aggressive elements of Christianity: “You guys are
freaks of a whole different breed ... You guys are a bunch of wild animals.
Man!” as Luce is fond of telling his disciples (the idea is apparently that
adrenaline rushes are appropriate substitutes for being possessed by the Holy
Ghost). Nonetheless, Luce views his organiztion as a counterforce to modern
popular culture (pornography, violent video games, sexual content on television
and in the media, gay marriage, and the secularization of America and so on), and
as a combat force against the “purveyors of popular culture,” who he deems to
be “the enemy ... terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids,”
who are “raping virgin teenage America on the sidewalk, [while] everybody's
walking by and acting like everything's okay.”

TMM’s mission is “To provoke a young generation to
passionately pursue Jesus Christ and to take his life-giving message to the
ends of the Earth.” The group has been actively involved in various political
issues, especially in opposition to various atni-discrimination and civil
rights measures. TMM is also heavily involved in blatantly racism-fueled
missionary campaigns targeted e.g. at the violent barbarians that count as indigenous people in South America,
and in blatantly dishonest and sexist abstinence-only purity programs.

2 comments:

Actually, the Honor Academy is much more dangerous than ATF. It's not run by Dave Hasz anymore (he left about 2 years ago.) But leadership hasn't changed much since and while Dave was very influential, the other leaders were pretty horrible too.

Check out www.recoveringalumni.com for many personal accounts of abuse within Teen Mania and other stories of the crazy happenings over the years.

Yes, you can say these things, please don't write off everything underneath him. Many people have questioned and quite often doubted his militaristic campaigns. The people there both serving and leading aren't just stewing about thinking of ways to hate people. Most (not all) are genuinely trying to love people as they are and who they are.

^ Actually the Honor Academy isn't more dangerous. The person who wrote this and the person who writes that blog seemingly are self victims to humans - people have tried to reconcile their issues, but that has apparently continued to be difficult. It's a weird place (really weird at times), I know cause I went, but it's under the same social pressures any organization has. You can blog about all the bad all you want because it's not perfect there. I loved it there. I wouldn't go back and I did have to "recover" a bit after it, but I'm happy I did it.